Roethlisberger lawyers say accuser's words prove her claims were lies

Aug. 21, 2009

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Lawyers for Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting a Harrah’s Lake Tahoe employee during a celebrity golf tournament last year, filed a motion to dismiss the case, saying his accuser’s own words prove that her claims were lies.

The motion, which included pages of e-mails and text messages, as well as affidavits from Andrea McNulty’s friends and co-workers, said that she should undergo a psychiatric examination “because substantial evidence calls her mental capacity into question.”

“Plaintiff is a disturbed and calculating woman who, together with counsel, fabricated a claim of sexual assault against a two-time Super Bowl winning quarterback to save her job and extort a large monetary payoff,” Roethlisberger’s Reno lawyer, John Echeverria, said in a motion.

The motion states that “an uncorroborated report on a notable sports Web site” states that McNulty wants to drop the lawsuit, but her lawyer, Cal Dunlap, won’t let her.

“Admittedly, this report is not the most reliable source, but if there is any possibility that a disturbed woman is being improperly manipulated by counsel, an immediate psychiatric examination is plainly warranted,” the motion said.

McNulty sued Roethlisberger and eight Harrah’s employees, in July, claiming he raped her last year, and management conspired to cover it up.

Her lawsuit said that she reported the alleged attack to the security chief the next day and fell into a deep depression in the months that followed.

But in affidavits attached to the motion to dismiss, several co-workers said that McNulty was excited about the prospect of having personal relations with Roethlisberger and later bragged about having sex with him.

Besides an affidavit by a former co-worker, Angela Antonetti, who said McNulty was excited about her sexual encounter with Roethlisberger, a Harrah’s butler named William Santos said that McNulty told him she wanted to go to Roethlisberger’s room for sex.

Santos also said that McNulty had become stressed, and was losing weight, because an online relationship she was having with a solider named Ben, who purportedly was stationed in Afghanistan, had ended.

It was later discovered that “Ben” didn’t exist, and the relationship had been fabricated by the wife of a man with whom McNulty had had an affair.

The motion also includes a report by Peter Garza, who is the president of a computer forensic consulting firm, and who examined e-mails and text messages between McNulty and the soldier named Ben.

The messages between the two track their relationship, including during the time that the alleged sexual assault occurred, until the break-up, which resulted in McNulty taking time off work.